Robert Chambers

Fellow of British Academy of Social Sciences; Research Associate and Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK

Born in Cirencester (a small town in southwest England) in 1932, Robert Chambers has been one of the most influential scholars and writers in International Development Studies since the 1980s. For nearly five decades, he has been a researcher (serves as Research Associate now) at the Institute of Development Studies, based at the University of Sussex in England. His academic background covers Biology, History and Public Administration. Rich in field experiences in East Africa and South Asia, he has (since the 1980s), been advocating for putting the poor and the marginalized at the center of development and policy processes, particularly the process of problem identification as well as the making and implementation of poverty alleviation policies and projects. His idea of “putting the last first” has been widely accepted, exerting profound impacts on development research and practices in recent decades. He has been referred to as "development's best advocate", and the prevailing participatory approaches should be attributed to his work (including PRA). His current concerns and interests include Professionalism, Power, The Personal Dimension in Development, Participatory Methodologies, Epistemology, Poverty, Rural Sanitation, Stunting, Teaching and Learning with Large Numbers, and Community-Led Total Sanitation. He has written and edited many books and numerous articles (as sole and co-author), including, inter alia, Rural Development: Putting the Last First (1983); Farmer First: Farmer Innovation and Agricultural Research (1989); Challenging the Professions: Frontiers for Rural Development (1993); Whose Reality Counts: Putting the First Last (1997); Paradigms, Poverty and Adaptive Pluralism (2010); Provocations for Development (2012); Into the Unknown: Explorations in Development Practice (2014); Can We Know Better?: Reflections for Development (2017). In 2013 he became an Honorary Fellow of the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. Recognized as a highly influential figure in the evolution of development studies, developing work on participatory rural appraisal so that it could be widely adopted, he was elected as Fellow of British Academy of Social Sciences in 2014.